Ah, I just tried using Flow on mediawiki.org. Now I understand what everyone's talking about.
This is definitely not how Echo was intended to be used. The Echo scope definition[1] on mediawiki.org specifically says that it is not to be used for watchlist items. The developer guide also says that new notifications should be opt-in by default unless they are critical.[2]
1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_%28Notifications%29#Scope 2. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_%28Notifications%29/Developer_guide#Conv...
Ryan Kaldari
On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 8:08 AM, Derric Atzrott <datzrott@alizeepathology.com
wrote:
- *it* *doesn't* *scale* (constantly seeing a "(3)" or new emails pop
up
if you're active in ~6 discussions is a pain)
OK, so how do you suggest changing it?
- _nothing_ on-wiki ever warrants an urgent reaction ever
All the community members who clamored for the return of the Orange Bar
of
Death seem to disagree with you.
You use the past tense. I *still* clamor for the Orange Bar of Death.
Agreed! I participate in a fair number of discussions pretty regularly, and being notified of mentions and pings is probably my favourite thing about echo. Perhaps I am just a WP:Wikipediholic, but there are definitely things that happen on-wiki that warrant urgent reactions.
Just last night I accidentally screwed up someone's talk page and I'm very happy for the notification that I was left a message ("What the hell were you doing in this edit?!?") so that I could revert my edit quickly and apologise.
To me, the answer is obvious: pull messaging out of echo, and summarize notifications on echo for the remaining notifications (i.e. if a notification for a given page is already sitting unread, don't bump the number, and replace the message with "x AND y have happened on z". For messages, give us back the OBOD.
This is actually a good idea. You could have the individual items listed on Special:Notifications and just have the summarized items under the list in echo.
- Echo is a consequence of a watchlist page which many people find
insufficiently informative, intuitive, or easy to control.
Yes, the watchlist page needs a total overhaul. Notifications aren't necessarily about articles though. We considered having Echo integrated into the watchlist, but this would have make the project much more
complex
and politically contentious. As you say below, "simplicity is the key to success".
Don't get that.
You can't change things too much without it becoming politically contentious. One needn't look any further than the Mediaviewer controversy to see that. I'm sure there are other reasons as well that I am unaware of.
I want Flow notifications if someone replies to me, or mentions me in a talk post. Or even for everything if that Flow board would happen to be my own talk page for instance. BUT, that is separate from watching a page.
Normally, when watching a page, I would not want notifications on every page that I visit, for every reply to every post, new post or retitled post. I want to see what the last major changes were. Mostly, new topics, and the last change to a new topic.
Currently, I feel like Echo is forcing me to consume Flow discussion, where rather, I only want to be 'subscribed' to them and then consume the subscription at the moment that I feel comfortable doing that. It is like it is mixing my mailbox with my newspaper...
I haven't played around with Flow yet, but if that is how Flow integrates into Echo, I can definitely see that being a huge complaint from a ton of people. I'd find that somewhat annoying too.
Thank you, Derric Atzrott
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